THEOLOGY AND THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONSby Jack
Miles

Peace will come not when any one terrorist and his network of
secret agents have been "surgically" excised but when an authentic
alternative vision has emerged within the House of Islam.

JACK MILES, Senior Advisor to the President at the J. Paul Getty
Trust and a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, is
the author of Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God
(Alfred A. Knopf).

In the 1940s, the most important foreign policy intellectual in the
United States was George F. Kennan. Kennan, who served briefly in the
Truman Administration, was among the first to recognize that the United
States could not defeat communism outright but could contain it and the
nations infected by it, beginning with the Soviet Union. What came to be
called the Cold War seems in retrospect to have been inevitable, but it
was not inevitable at all. Instead of the Cold War, the world could all
too easily have fought World War III. Containment was the bold and
politically creative alternative to that war. The 1947 article in
Foreign Affairs in which Kennan, writing as "X," first laid out
containment as a strategy remains, unsurprisingly, the most popular
article ever published in that periodical.

In the 1990s, the most important foreign policy intellectual in the
United States may yet prove to have been Samuel P. Huntington. The
second-most-popular article in the history of Foreign Affairs has
been his controversial 1993 "The Clash of Civilizations," an attempt to
see what lay beyond the end of Kennan's Cold War. What Huntington saw was,
on the one hand, economic and cultural globalization and, on the other,
resistance to it by those who saw it as merely the latest form of Western,
historically Christian, and at this late date specifically American
imperialism. Though Huntington noted that many non-Western powers had cast
their lot with the emerging global order, it seemed equally clear to him
that China and world Islam had not done so, might never do so, and might
even join forces in a joint counteroffensive against the West.

"The Clash of Civilizations" was ferociously criticized when it
appeared, and events have not entirely confirmed it. Thus, though
relations between China and the West remain strained, many informed
observers now predict that the aging leadership of the People's Republic
will soon be succeeded by a generation open to the West politically as
well as economically. The Beijing Olympics may yet become the symbol of
this rapprochement. A week after the World Trade Center was destroyed,
China was admitted to the World Trade Organization.

But what of world Islam? The border separating what Muslims call
dar al-islam, the "House of Submission (Islam)," from dar
al-harb, the "House of Warfare" seems increasingly to define a long
irregular battlefront, one that as of September 11, 2001, stretches
across four continents. With striking frequency, those post-Cold War
conflicts typically termed "local" or "parochial" or at most "sectarian"
turn out to be battles between historically Muslim and historically
non-Muslim populations. An incomplete list would include, moving from east
to west:

Left off this list are conflicts that, however bitter, have not risen
to the level of outright civil war. On a list of this sort we might find,
among others: Assyrian Orthodox Catholics vs. Muslims in Iraq and Coptic
Catholics vs. Muslims in Egypt.

My point in drawing up this list is to suggest that for the
umma -- an ancient Arabic term that has come to denote the
totality of Muslims in the world at any given time -- the House of Islam
must surely seem a civilization under siege. I use the word
civilization, as Huntington did, because umma refers to
so much more than our word religion comprehends. In the
formulation of one contemporary scholar, it refers to "religion, shared
values, and common concerns" yet "does not denote nationality, kinship, or
ethnicity." The umma is Islam's version of what secular diplomacy
likes to call the international community, and there is no third
contender. India and China are each enormous, and each has a large
diaspora, yet of neither can it be said that "it does not denote
nationality, kinship, or ethnicity." Only the umma matches the
international community in internal variety, geographical dispersion, and
potentially global ambition.

The clash-of-civilizations question, from the Muslim side, is whether
the umma can join the international community or whether it must
incorporate the international community into itself. From the Western
side, the clash-of-civilizations question, though essentially the same
question inverted, must begin with the perhaps grudging recognition that
there exist, in the first place, two bona fide international communities
separated by a genuine cultural border along which for a long while now
there has been more war than peace. No single statement in Huntington's
Foreign Affairs article attracted more critical comment than
"Islam has bloody borders." In the subsequent book, Huntington wrote: "I
made that judgment on the basis of a casual survey of intercivilizational
conflicts. Quantitative evidence from every disinterested source
conclusively demonstrates its validity." The book assembles that evidence,
and further evidence has accumulated since.

It is easy in the historically Christian cultures of Europe and America
to dismiss conflicts between Hindus and Muslims or even between Jews and
Muslims as alien fanaticism. It is almost equally easy to regard the
struggles of exotic Christianities like Ethiopian Orthodoxy as irrelevant
to any such struggle that the once Christian but now secular West might
have with Islam.

But to do this is to make a serious mistake if only because from the
Muslim side where modernity, Christianity, and the West are a single
unholy stew, all these struggles are understood to be the same struggle.
For the West, the defining struggles of the twentieth century have been,
in succession, democracy vs. fascism and democracy vs. communism. But for
the umma, these are simply the latest civil wars in the long,
bloody history of the House of Warfare. In the last days of World
War II, what mattered in a Muslim country like Morocco was not that
racist fascism had been defeated but that the yoke of Christian France
might at last be thrown off. In the last days of the Cold War, what
mattered in a country like Afghanistan was not that godless communism had
been defeated but that the knout had fallen at last from the fist of
Christian Russia. The umma had its own reasons for holding the
view -- common enough in the West, for other reasons -- that the Soviet
Union had simply continued the Russian Empire in a more malignant form.
Secularized Christianity, as seen from inside the House of Islam, is
simply degenerate Christianity and as such is even more alien to Islam
than its ancestor.

Americans argue over whether Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan deserves
more credit for defeating the Soviet Union. Osama bin Laden, to American
astonishment, thought that the umma, rallying to a jihad
in Afghanistan, had won the real victory and would now proceed to win a
second victory over the United States itself. American astonishment at the
grandiose claim and American horror at the lethal ambition may stand as a
measure of the chasm that separates Western and Muslim civilization.
Unless this chasm can be bridged, the world may slide into a war of
terrorist reprisal and counterreprisal with no end in sight. Where should
the work begin?

In my judgment, it should begin with theology, a term that naïve
enthusiasts for globalization tend to use as a synonym for
that-which-may-be-dispensed-with or, worse, that-which-gets-in-the-way.
But real theology is more than that, and the moment may be at hand for
religion -- and for theology as its intellectual dimension -- to come in
from the cold as a topic in international diplomacy.

Because of the secularization of the state in the West and the
concomitant privatization of religion, Western governments, when dealing
with one another, do not expect to be required to deal with one another's
religious beliefs or religious leaders. But in the House of Islam,
religious leaders typically have a far greater claim on the public than do
civilian leaders, and it is a fatal mistake to leave the Muslim public --
the umma -- out of the equation. At the end of World War I,
as historian David Fromkin cogently demonstrates in A Peace to End All
Peace, Britain and France vastly overestimated the importance of Arab
nationalism and correspondingly underestimated the importance of Muslim
religion as an organizing principle in the polity they sought to construct
on the ruins of the Turkish Empire. In effect, the British and the French
were psychologically incapable of dealing with the Middle East other than
through leaders manufactured to resemble their nominally religious but
passionately nationalist selves. They were at a loss when confronted with
a culture whose real leaders were passionately religious and only
nominally nationalist.

After 1956, when the United States became the dominant power in the
Middle East, it made the same mistake -- vastly overestimating Iranian
nationalism as represented by the Shah and correspondingly underestimating
Muslim religion as represented by Ayatollah Khomeini. It was as if the
United States had to find someone like the Shah to deal with because,
well, how could a self-respecting secretary of state possibly do business
with an ayatollah? What would they discuss? Theology?

Yes, friends, theology. And secretaries of state may have to learn some
theology if the current clash between Western and Muslim civilization is
to yield to disengagement and peaceful coexistence, to say nothing of more
fruitful kinds of relationship. If Osama bin Laden is a spiritual leader
with military designs on the United States, the first, crucial insight
should be that he and his movement must be dealt with as what they are. To
suppose that we can achieve security by dealing with him as a common
criminal and with the Muslim governments that harbor his movement as
secular governments unconcerned with the religious dimension in his appeal
is to fight this new war as if it were the last war.

To say this is not to dignify the man but to recognize that containing
the threat he poses may entail promoting a true alternative to him in the
world where he originates. This task, in turn, will require more theology
than it takes to issue a routine and utterly uninformed declaration that,
of course, Osama bin Laden does not represent true Islam. Who
does represent true Islam? "Will the real Islam please stand up?"
This is the kind of question that our military and diplomatic institutions
are designed never to ask and never to notice that they are not asking. In
his 1997 memoirs, Kennan characterized the world the West faces as one for
which "neither our ingrained habits nor our international institutions
have prepared us." He was right, and in no regard more so
this one.

Engaging a jihad for the soul of Islam as if it were an
international manhunt for a common criminal is a battle plan guaranteed to
fail. How can we make war against all the nations that have harbored the
agents of Osama bin Laden when the United States itself is one of those
nations? We have done so unwillingly and unwittingly, but how witting or
willing was Egypt to harbor the Muslim Brotherhood agents who assassinated
President Anwar Sadat? So far, the paper trail left by the World Trade
Center saboteurs has led to friendly Arab states like Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
and the United Arab Emirates rather than to Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan.
Is this not just what one would expect of a movement out to conceal its
tracks and frustrate retaliation? Though bin Laden declared himself the
enemy of virtually every Muslim government except the Taliban
regime in Afghanistan, some Muslim regimes clearly stood higher on his
enemies list than others. How very clever to implicate just those regimes
in his crimes.

But in the long run, there cannot be any definitive sorting out of good
Muslim states from bad ones. It is the Muslim umma as a whole
that has harbored this murderous movement within it, and it is the Muslim
umma as a whole that must somehow be persuaded to break with it.
Here we begin to see the novel defensive strategy that might become in
this new global confrontation what Kennan's containment was in the last
one. Just as militant communism could not be militarily defeated in the
last clash of civilizations, so militant Islam cannot be militarily
defeated in the new one. Decapitation does not deal a death blow when the
enemy has many heads. Peace will come not when any one terrorist and his
network of secret agents have been "surgically" excised but when an
authentic alternative vision has emerged within the House of Islam that
makes the vision of victory-by-terrorism irrelevant and unwelcome.

The development of such an alternative vision, however, will require a
major paradigm shift in Western diplomacy. It will no longer suffice to
treat religion as a mere happenstance ("I happen to be Jewish," "I happen
to be Muslim") and therefore as a political irrelevancy. This method of
dealing with religion politically may have served us well enough in
overcoming Christianity's own hideous wars of religion. But the old way
will not meet this new challenge, for it takes off the table just the
topic that militant Islam finds most compelling. One can no more discuss
that topic without discussing theology than one can discuss communism
without discussing ideology. Theology is the ideological element in
religion, and nothing at this moment could be more tragically evident than
that we have ignored it to our peril.

Our leaders, in sum, must find a way to untie their tongues on a topic
of world-historical importance. Fortunately, there are those near at hand
to whom they can turn for help in doing so. In 1968, anthropologist
Clifford Geertz wrote a book called Islam Observed in which he
compared and contrasted what were then the western and eastern extremes of
the House of Islam: Morocco and Indonesia. Since 1968, however, the
western extreme has moved westward from Morocco to North America and, in
fact, all the way to California. So far, no paper trail has connected the
September 11 terrorists to any American or Canadian mosque, and there
is every reason to believe that Osama bin Laden's contempt for the
acculturated Muslim communities of North America is total. But in the
years and decades ahead, why may it not be the voice of these Western
Muslim communities rather than his voice that is heard most loudly in the
world umma? Rather than the enemy within, the Muslims of the West
should be seen as the ally within.

Muslims often, alas, have reason to fear other Muslims. The bloodiest
war of the latter half of the twentieth century, surpassing even the
genocide in Rwanda, was the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. For American and
other Western Muslims who dare to claim an international role, the
personal risks may be as large as the intellectual challenge. But if this
community of often recent immigrants can rise to the historic challenge,
the good news is that they will not be without allies in the House of
Islam. Is there a single Muslim nation in the world that aspires to the
condition of Afghanistan? Is there not good reason to believe that an
authentically Western and authentically Muslim voice would find a wide
audience? Time will tell, but the enemies of our enemy may yet prove to be
the friends of our Muslim friends.

If American Muslims, clearly a key community at this juncture, can
muster the necessary courage and intelligence, the question that must then
be asked is: Will they find correspondingly courageous and appropriately
educated allies in Washington -- allies for whom theology is not
"theology"? To make the needed difference, the Muslim communities of the
West must be dignified with much more than the occasional courtesy
invitation to the diplomatic dinner table. They must be not just
cultivated as allies of convenience but heard and honored as teachers.
They must be protected and supported both materially and spiritually as
they take on the enormous challenge of raising from their own ranks the
leadership that will save two worlds at once.

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